Death of intellect?

“There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: Each man carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a philosopher, an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought” — Antonio Gramsci

CRITICAL minds have never found space to thrive in Pakistan. For most of our history, they have been at best isolated, and at worst criminalised. Today, we are again confronted with an all-out attack on intellectual life. Junaid Hafeez, a gifted young university teacher, has been in jail, mostly in solitary confinement, for 17 years. No judge is willing to hear his case — filed after he was accused of blasphemy — no matter the actual evidence. No government since 2009 has had the spine to pardon him, despite the falsehoods invoked to frame him.

When Mashal Khan, another precocious young talent, was lynched on a university campus in Mardan after being falsely accused of blasphemy nine years ago, we were told something would give. Some argue that the apparent clampdown on the TLP is indicative that things have indeed changed, but that is to miss the point because no matter what the official policy is with respect to any kind of religiously inspired militancy, voices like Junaid and Mashal are still being suppressed.

Baloch intellectuals are the biggest targets of all. The outrageous abduction of the two most senior administrators of Gwadar University is the latest example. Writers, poets and journalists are killed in cold blood. To simply attribute all of this wanton violence to separatist militants is neither here nor there; many in Balochistan don’t buy the claim that all targeted killings are the work of insurgents, and in any case, a state that cannot protect the cream of Baloch society from ‘enemies’ is failing to perform its basic function.

The digital age has changed the very meaning of intellectual life.

It is not by chance that Pakistan’s most pressing social, economic and political challenges today are more or less the same ones that have bogged us down since the early years; the centre-periphery divide; the weaponisation of religion; an extractive development model that benefits elites and their imperial patrons whilst pulverising the mass of people; and, finally, the militarisation of state and society. Things have continued to spiral because the establishment and its hangers-on refuse to allow interrogation of these structural crises. Those who nevertheless persist in raising critical questions are declared persona non grata, and even clumped together with the external ‘enemies’ that are supposedly the sole instigators of our problems.

Pakistan’s long tryst with anti-intellectualism previously marked it out as a black sheep, but the trajectory of the whole world, it must be said, is increasingly converging with ours. The digital age has changed the very meaning of intellectual life. First, TV anchors burst onto the scene as new age intellectuals, viewers hanging on to their every word irrespective of veracity, let alone the logic of reasoning that underlay their analyses. In a few short years, categories like ‘social media influencers’ and ‘YouTubers’ have arguably overtaken the proverbial TV anchor, the latter only as important as the number of followers s/he is able to muster on X, Facebook and so on.

The nature of ‘debate’ promoted by this emergent category of ‘intellectuals’, even where it does not abide by the state’s dictates, is generally shallow, and often sensationalist. There are, of course, ex­­­-ceptions who de­­ploy social me­­d­ia to beam out critical, deep and socially relevant ideas. But these exceptions prove the rule inasmuch as historical facts are increasingly irr-e­levant, modalities of communication increasingly determine the worth of intellectual output, and ‘official’ narratives still dominate.

Overall trends notwithstanding, the state has clamped down on social media discourse too. Those with even a cursory understanding of the digital surveillance apparatus know that what we are experiencing now is only the tip of a very large, totalitarian iceberg.

This does not mean that critical intellectuals will just die out. Indeed, growing repression is actually confirmation of their continued relevance. Those who continue to historicise and undertake in-depth interrogation of social phenomena, not least of all our long-standing structural crises, do so not to receive state-sanctioned medals but because of ideological and political commitments. History testifies that it is such commitments that prevent the complete dehumanisation of society and undergird the unending struggle for freedom.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2026